Visual Resources Center Department of Art History, University of Chicago
Cochrane-Woods Art Center
5540 S. Greenwood Ave Room 257
Monday—Friday, 9am–4:45pm
Appointments
Schedule an appointment to meet with a VRC staff member in person or over Zoom to consult on your teaching, research, publishing, or personal archive projects.
Accessibility
The VRC is committed to accessibility for all of our services and resources. However, our office is located on the second floor of Cochrane-Woods Art Center and accessible only by stairs. If you need an accommodation to access VRC equipment or services, please email visualresources@uchicago.edu.
Read the VRC's Accessibility Statement for more details on our approach and plan to update resources.
Commitment to Ethical and Anti-Racist Digital Stewardship
Read the VRC's Commitment to Ethical and Anti-Racist Digital Stewardship and its annual update for details on how we're working to make our services and collections more equitable.
Visual Resources Center Staff
Please contact visualresources@uchicago.edu for the quickest response.
Bridget Madden (she/her)
Associate Director
CWAC Room 257C
(773) 702-0261
bridgetm@uchicago.edu
Allie Scholten (she/her)
Digital Collections Manager
CWAC Room 257A
(773) 702-7852
ascholten@uchicago.edu
Employment at the VRC
Student Employment
The VRC provides a variety of student employment opportunities for undergraduates, MAPH, and graduate students to gain professional experience working on various aspects of the digital collections' life cycle. While the open student employment positions posted to Handshake for undergraduates and GRAD Gargoyle for MAPH and PhD positions, which outline the specific project scope and responsibilities of each position, responsibilities typically focus on digitization or metadata workflows, including research and critical cataloging, for LUNA, the main database for art images used for teaching and research at UChicago, although some student employees may also work on copyright, digital collections management, or other special projects. Other VRC student employment positions support the Joel Snyder Materials Collection, including research, documentation for LUNA, collection development, and more.
The VRC typically hires student positions for the academic year in late summer to begin in Autumn Quarter, but we occasionally post additional openings on a quarterly basis. All VRC student employees are able to attend paid professional development opportunities on VRC work time, and VRC staff provide our student employees with professional references and letters of recommendation.
Staff
Open positions will be posted on the UChicago Jobs Online Employment Site.
History of Our Collections
Established in 1902 alongside the Department of Art History, the Visual Resources Center began as an extensive collection of glass lantern slides. During the second half of the 20th century, the Art History Department Slide Library evolved into a collection of more than 350,000 35mm slides. The VRC has been an all-digital operation since 2006 and our collections comprise nearly 400,000 digital images. For more information, visit our Legacy Collections.